When Grandma Was A Little Girl - #18

Story #18 - Say goodbye to the pool…

Well, all good things sooner or later come to an end. Right? Right!
You would think that having a swimming pool in your back yard would be fun forever and you’d never grow tired of it! That’s not exactly true. The first two or three years we swam in it all the time. Then after awhile we kind of lost interest in it. We would swim in it, but then it just sat. We ran the pump when we used it and to save, we wouldn’t run it as much when we were not swimming in it. When the summer is hot, the color ‘green’ likes to grow in the pool. We would have to clean in. When we had not been in it for quite a while algae grew on the walls and that was yuck and not fun to clean. So the pool was emptied. I can relate to that as we have a Jacuzzi in our yard in the home we now have. The first three years it was used a lot and then it got used less and less. It got down to about once a month if anyone got in it.

Douglas and his friends used it the most. But when he left for college, it sat a lot. It cost money to keep it running and buy the chemicals to keep it clean. So we emptied and it’s staying empty!

Now what? --- Now that our swimming pool was emptied.

It was just an empty pool. My dad decided to turn it into a storage room. He had torn down the little barn by the pool. My mom wanted to landscape and improve the look of our backyard. So down came the little barn! My dad dug out steps to go down into the pool. That meant he had to dig into the front of the pool to make steps to go down to the floor level. He poured concrete steps. He put a door on and also a roof. It was cool in there. He also wired it with a light switch and a light to come on. It was pretty dark in there with no light! When he first built the swimming pool he had also built a wire fence along the back of the pool and then put concrete stucco on it to give privacy to the pool when we used to swim in it. Well, that fence was starting to sag and it also came down!

One day I went to get something out of the newly converted pool – now a cellar – and it always was kind of creepy to me. I only liked to go out there when it was broad daylight. Well we found a few ‘black widow spiders’ and they are poisonous. After that, I never went in there anymore by myself. I hated spiders!

If I had a spider in my room, I would call my mom, “Mom! There’s a spider in my room! Can you come and kill it for me?” She would kill them for me. She would tell me, “You know, you are a million times bigger than that little spider. It’s probably more afraid of you than you are of it!” Somehow that did not give me any comfort. I was still afraid of them. As I got older they didn’t bother me anymore. I killed them myself.

As far as our backyard getting cleaned it. We did work on that one entire summer and it was much nicer looking! It also meant my brothers and I had more yard work to do to keep it cleaned up. It was amazing that after a little bit of rain those darn weeds grew so tall and so fast! My very ‘least favorite job’ as a kid growing up was ‘picking weeds!’ I hated it!